News United States can't tell what it got for $1.2 billion spent on Iraqi police

United States can't tell what it got for $1.2 billion spent on Iraqi police

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - The U.S. State Department so badly managed a $1.2-billion contract for Iraqi police training it can't tell what it got for the money, a new report says.

Because of disarray in invoices and records on the project - and because the government is trying to recoup money paid inappropriately to contractor DynCorp International, LLC - auditors have temporarily suspended their effort to review the contract's implementation, said Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen.

Bowen had been trying to review a February 2004 contract to DynCorp awarded by the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. The company was to provide housing, food, security, facilities, training support, law-enforcement staff with various specialties, as well as weapons and armour for personnel assigned to the program.

"I guess it's a familiar theme," Bowen said Monday, in that problems have previously been documented with both DynCorp and the agency overseeing the contract.

Although training has been conducted and equipment provided under the contract, the bureau is in the process of trying to organize and validate invoices and does not believe its records accurately show the reasons for most payments that were made, the report said.

"As a result, INL does not know specifically what it received for most of the $1.2 billion in expenditures under its DynCorp contract for the Iraqi Police Training Program," Bowen said in a new 18-page report.

The new Iraq war funding bill has $1.5 billion tacked on in the fine print to help the Mexican government fight the drug cartels. We have done this before and the money disappeared into the Mexican bureaurocracy.